IS IT TAPS FOR BROADWAY?

By Martha Duffy

Another lean Broadway season is sputtering to a close, and as usual before the Tony Awards, there is a flutter of activity. Last week two bright dancey shows opened: Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, a black tap-dance revue developed downtown at the New York Shakespeare Festival; and Big, a more conventional musical based on the 1988 movie that starred Tom Hanks. Both have broad appeal; neither fulfills all its potential.

With nine players, 'Da Noise might be called a boutique musical. What story there is recounts the history of black experience in America. At best this is an episodic enterprise with little or no connection between the vignettes, some of which are blazingly theatrical, others a scant excuse for more hoofing.

But what hoofing! The dancers, all men, cross and recross the stage with demon drive. The sounds vary as strains of jazz, blues, hip-hop and gospel interweave. This is a very raucous show, about as far removed from the classic buck-and-wing as tap can get. The performers slap down the beat hard, and if that doesn't rattle the eardrums, they are miked at the ankle. It doesn't make for subtlety, but for visceral excitement.

The show's star and choreographer is Savion Glover, already a seasoned Broadway performer at 22. He made his debut at 12 in Tap Dance Kid, and has since starred in Black and Blue and Jelly's Last Jam. Even granting this list of precocious credits, Glover's style is surprisingly mature. He will doubtless go through life being compared to Fred Astaire, but the link is authentic, not so much stylistically--Glover pounds his feet down, Astaire seemed poised for flight--as in the unique quality of each man's work. Just as it would be impossible to mistake the bumptious Gene Kelly for the elegant Astaire, Glover's silhouette--arms raised but loose, hips and legs stamping out the action--is indelible.

'Da Noise is less than two hours long, including the intermission, and that is just as well. Producer-creator- director George C. Wolfe, who directed Angels in America and runs the New York Shakespeare Festival, is content here with a series of impressions, and the book is weak. In this revue, the feet have it.

If 'Da Noise demonstrates that less can be more, Big insists that more is more is more. If ever a musical was aptly named, this is it: outsize sets, a spillover cast, a warehouse worth of shiny toys and enough good cheer to depress anybody. Making a stage musical out of the Penny Marshall film was a good idea, but not an easy one to bring off. That film, about a 12-year-old boy who makes a wish to become "big" and lives to regret that his prayers were answered, had two elusive qualities that get lost in translation: charm and impeccable taste. The movie is consciously scaled down and is able to sustain the dreamlike quality that a fairy tale needs to have. Onstage, Big blusters. There are squads of kids charging around, excellent dancers all, but they look like pint-size adults churning out routines. Nothing is left to chance or serendipity.

What saves Big from being a big bore is the attractiveness of the principal performers. As the overgrown Josh Baskin, Daniel Jenkins lacks Hanks' emotional range, but he is expert at seeming beleaguered and he moves very well. As his befuddled girlfriend at the toy company, Crista Moore has energy and spunk with just the right overlay of sweetness. Brett Tabisel, as Josh's wise, loyal friend, is another in a seemingly endless supply of Broadway kids who act with an unmatched New York blend of guts and insouciance.

The score, by David Shire, is a serviceable, if obvious, obeisance to Stephen Sondheim, and the lyrics, by Richard Maltby Jr. are ingratiating. British director Mike Ockrent keeps his army of players busy; one could wish for a few quiet, lyric moments between assaults by dancing skateboarders.

Still, the FAO Schwarz toy store, one of the show's backers, got what it paid for: production standards are high and the whole enterprise looks like a gleaming new toy. The famous sequence in which Hanks and the toy company president play Chopsticks with their feet on a giant piano turns into a grandiose production number. What is missing is the message the movie sent, that the adult world is full of pompous posturing and miserable backstabbing. Josh is a wild success at the toy company because he has a child's unblinking eye for what's fun--to anything else he just asks, "What's the point?" The irony can be turned inside out: most adult jobs can be done by a competent child. But the stage version of Big loses these insights because it presents all the characters as children--or stunted adults. Not much room for grace notes there.